The Fitness Tracker Fallout

We’ve talked about this a bit before. Fitness trackers are all the rage, but they have yet to overcome the challenge of becoming an enduring product line.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised by this fallout. When I look at the graveyard of fitness products that my wife has purchased, they’ve all gone through a similar fallout. They get purchased, used briefly and then set to the side. It’s very much the nature of the fitness market.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see anything in the fitness market that will change this reality. The closest I get is the health sensors that are integrated directly into the cell phone. Our cell phones have GPS, accelerometors and other health related sensors built in. We’re really close to being able to track much of our health on our smartphone with no interaction from us as the end user. That will be a game changer.

Another example of this is some of the amazing ways that our health data can be calculated and tracked through our cell phone’s video camera. Imagine if much of our health data could be collected by taking a selfie a day. I can’t market a product that asks you to sit in front of a camera every day. I can market taking a selfie a day. We’re almost there.

Other wearables like smart clothing are interesting as well. Last I checked we all wore clothing regularly. There’s no change of habit required to wear smart clothing that monitors your health. This is going to be the key to avoiding the fall out.

What else do you see happening with health tracking? What will help us avoid the seemingly inevitable fall out?

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September 4, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Health Sensors  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Watch  Wearables
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Greattrainer: Take to the Streets; Track Your Workouts and Prepare for Your Race

There are tons of apps out there that will track your workouts, and I am sure there are any number of them that are effective.  After trying to download quite a few of them with no luck I was able to download the Greattrainer app, and I am totally pleased.

The app itself is pretty straightforward and simple.  You simply put in what type of exercise you will be doing such as running or cycling,  then you click on the type of terrain you will be on, and finally you can input a certain pace if you want to.

As you exercise you get audible notices of how far you have traveled, which was actually the one problem I had with this app.  I was simultaneously using Pandora and every time the app told me how far I had gone it would pause Pandora and I would have to go back to my phone and turn it back on.  Not a huge tragedy, but it was kind of annoying.

When you finish your exercise you simply click stop and you can look at the results.  The details screen after you exercise includes distance, duration, average speed, average altitude, calories burned, and average pace.  That was quite a bit more information than I expected, but there is even more available on their website.

Like most quality apps, there is also an online community that further enhances the apps capabilities.  You can send your results to the Take to the Streets website where you can add them to your training diary.

The training diary can be used to simply track what you are doing, or it can be used to help you prepare for a specific race or event.  Along those lines, they even have training schedules that will help you prepare for those events.  The combination of schedules and tracking makes training that much more effective.

The website also provides numerous training tips and videos to help improve your training.

There is also an online community where you can share your training results and discuss whatever you want with other members.  Accountability is a huge part of being successful with exercise, and these types of communities can be great for that.  Whether you connect with your friends or strangers it really doesn’t matter as it is the support that makes the difference.

No matter what app you use, or if you use no app at all, what really matters is that we all get out and exercise.

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April 21, 2011 I Written By

Filed Under: Blackberry  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
Tags:  Greattrainer  Smartphone apps  Take to the Streets  Training Diary

Tracking Fitness and Activity on Your Smartphone


I’ve been hearing about a number of devices and smartphone apps recently that track your fitness and activity levels. Two examples are the Fitbit and DigiFit and I’m sure there are many more. The concept behind these devices is pretty simple. You wear a simple device on your pants, shirt, bra or wrist and it keeps track of your levels of activity through the day.

I read one thing that described these as a pedometer on steroids. That’s a generally fair assessment, although these devices are becoming much more advanced than a simple pedometer. For example, most pedometers try and tell you how many calories you burn. To do so, they basically take your number of steps and multiply it with an average number of calories per step. There’s no need to explain why this isn’t the most accurate of data.

Instead of this simple calorie calculation, the latest devices are using a built in accelerometer to be able to calculate movement and calorie burn more accurately. Certainly this still isn’t an exact science, but it is a really interesting set of data and more accurate than using some crazy average. It’s always bothered me when treadmills tried to tell me how many calories I’ve burned. At least this gets us a little closer to reality since it’s measuring movement on a more granular level.

These devices also have started to come with built in sleep sensors. Tracking how and when you sleep is another interesting set of data. I’m not sure we even know how valuable this data could be, but I’m happy that we’re starting to collect the data so we can’t start working on projects that will evaluate how to best use the data.

Of course, one of the real keys to these devices is that they easily sync with a website online. The ones I saw will automatically sync if you’re within 15 feet of the docking station. I assume this is using some sort of bluetooth communication, but won’t be surprised if near field communication takes off and makes this syncing of your fitness and activity data even better.

Then, the cool part is that all of your fitness and activity data is available on your iPhone or Android smartphone or on the web. For a stats junkie like me (and most people that I know) this is really cool. In fact, I think we’re just at the beginning of deploying various devices that track our health data. I can easily see us tracking blood sugar levels, cholesterol, blood pressure and many other levels. Then, the implications for healthcare become even more interesting.

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March 3, 2011 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Android  Apple  Health Care  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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